A Tedious Watch: Utterly Unoriginal Action, Pukeworthy Humor
1 star
Mini Review:
Vicky Chadda the villain has siphoned off all the money from offshore accounts of big business baddies and the ministry needs a special ‘team’ to catch him and bring him back to India, alive because he’s got all the passwords in his head. Commando, two cops and a cyber cell dude traipse all over Thailand and Malaysia chasing Vicky Chadda. This slow moving movie has absolutely nothing original. The fight sequences are borrowed, the dialog is sloppy and the end is as good as propaganda.
Main Review:
It’s a big mistake releasing this action film with Logan where the kid can beat up baddies more effectively than the Big Beefy Commando (Vidyut Jamwal).
That said, this film is so terrible, you wonder what prompted them to make it. The film opens to a pathetic copy of the Thai film directed by Gareth Evans: The Raid: Redemption, where the hero goes into a building full of criminals. Alas Commando 2 budgets restrain them from a full house, so the Big Beefy enters an empty building filled with trash guarded by two penny fighters who die easily. Just as in The Raid, the bad guy is on the top floor, but in this case the floor is empty except for some computers which show cctv footage. And that jumping through a window? Sorry, but Jackie Chan did it first, and with so much awesomeness. His frame is small, and going through the chute is simply brilliant. In this movie when Big Beefy imitates it, they make the window bigger. It's as daft as you or I saying we can walk through windows, French windows.
The only reason why Big Beefy is shot by his own pal, is to show government back home that he shot the top floor guy in an encounter. Actually how else would your show Big Beefy topless? Anyway Big Beefy infiltrates a top secret team in a mission by corrupt politicians and big bad businessmen to get distributor of Black Money abroad, a one Vicky Chaddha repatriated from Malaysia.
Should be simple but the Malaysian safehouse is more like a hotel where servers are traipsing around with trays of food, the ‘team’ chatting away… The 4 person team is made up of a Police Officer Baktawar (Freddy Daruwala), encounter specialist Police Inspector Bhavna Reddy (Adah Sharma who speaks such terrible Hyderabadi Hindi that state would want to secede from the country, Sumit Gulati as the token Muslim person who is a cyber geek (thankfully gets killed and does not have to wait until the end of the film!) and Vidyut Jamwal who plays Karan.
Poor Shefali Shah! Such a good actor, and all she is made to do is flounce about, getting upset at her overgrown son, the state of the nation, the black money, the politicians. Even Adil Hussain has a pathetic role as the head of the secret service. Such a terrible waste.
So everyone betrays everyone and you discover Vicky Chaddha is one step ahead. Esha Gupta is Vicky Chaddha’s wife and gets to walk about in impossibly high heels, and offer really bad dialog. With so much betrayal going around, you forget to laugh at the name Jimmy Kher given to another cyber dude who is ‘such a clever hacker, he uses wi-fi at cafes to mask his identity’ (at this point you wake up to speak in smses in your head: wtf, wtf, wtf!)
The last fight sequence is in the same heli-pad terrace you saw in Kabali and many, many other bad action flicks. But the last fight here is well-shot and well choreographed and Big Beefy finally meets Popping Veins (the lad looks like a testosterone version of Ranjeet the villain of yore). The single star the film earns is with this fight. But then the already terribly directed film becomes pure propaganda when black money reaches poor farmers.
As they’re backslapping each other over patriotism, you wonder how and why does the government have the account numbers and passwords of bank accounts belonging to poor farmers?
Commando the original movie was a decent action flick. But Commando 2 is proof that Big Beefy without brains is best placed on a barbeque.
(this review appears on nowrunning dot com)
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